Posts Tagged ‘Apples&Snakes’

In this issue of zqNews, find out about my forthcoming video link between Texas and London, new audio tracks from Poems from the Road, and poetry improvisation projects in the pipeline for London and St Andrews.

Poems from the Road

I’ve uploaded two new tracks to my Poems from the Road SoundCloud playlist. There’s a fascinating interview I conducted with London Grip editor Michael Bartholomew-Biggs about poet-cum-cricketing commentator John Arlott’s pamphlet-length poem ‘Death on the Road’, and ‘Travelling the Roads in My Red Mini’, a poem by Ann Vaughan-Williams exploring the voices that accumulated in her car during her time as a psychiatric social worker

The Poems from the Road podcast is now available on the Apples and Snakes SoundCloud page, so if you missed it in December, you can now listen to it at your leisure. And the additional materials that I wasn’t able to include in the podcast are up on my SoundCloud page until the end of February. Check out the Poems from the Road webpage.

I’m also planning to submit a 10-minute Poems from the Road feature to Radio Wildfire, so if you’ve any favourite poems from the show or additional material, let me know and I’ll consider them for the feature.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to the show!

Texas 2 London

On 10th April the Austin International Poetry Festival (AIPF) is coming to London with Texas 2 London at the Colour House Theatre, Merton Abbey Mills. AIPF is renowned as a melting pot of world poetry, and our three guests will be trading poems with poets in Austin via a live video link. On our side we’ve got Matt Black, Agnes Meadows, and Kayo Chingonyi, and on the Texas side there’ll be Element615 plus two more to be confirmed.

Take part!
There’ll also be a chance for you to perform your work at the AIPF. At 7pm we’ll have an open mic (offline), and three participants from the open mic will then be offered a short slot during the video-linked part of the evening.

I’m co-hosting with electro-pop poetry duo Project Adorno, and the hosts on the other side of the Atlantic will be the irrepressible and always surprising Thom the World Poet and James Jacobs. I’m collaborating with OpenHaus Arts on producing Texas 2 London, and it’s supported by an Arts Development Fund grant from Merton Council.

Poetry Improvisation

My December workshop at the Scottish Writers’ Centre in Glasgow got a great write-up, and I have several poetry improvisation projects coming up in the next couple of months.

I’m particularly excited about an Apples and Snakes project called Word’s a Stage that’s starting this Saturday. I’ll be leading a series of four workshops with four emerging writers to develop a performance for early April (exact date TBA). We’ll be using improvisation techniques to generate material and the final performance will be at least part improvised on the night.

This is a valuable opportunity to explore what we can do with poetry improvisation when working with a group over a sustained period of time. I’ve got some ideas about feeding off the audience (so the audience become part of the poetry), chorus work, and layered set pieces with background and foreground voices, but in the end it’s down to the individuals in the group to see how they interact and what we come up with.

Leaving the Comfort Zone
I’m also offering a poetry improvisation workshop at Scotland’s Stanza poetry festival in St Andrew’s on Saturday 7 March. This will be a day-long workshop during which we’ll devise material for a short performance at the end of it. I believe there are a couple of places left, so still time to book.

Several exciting things have started happening recently. I’ve got a couple of poems, ‘Frogger’ and ‘Eating Ghosts’, included in the Jawspring Poetry and Art Exhibition, which will be showing at The Village Hall Gallery in Wimbledon (SW19 4QD) 19–23 March. My poems have been sent to two artists, Siobhan Tarr and Phil Deed, so I look forward to seeing their responses, interpretations, or reactions. There are twenty-five artists taking part, and seventeen poets from Merton Poets, who work will all be shown during the exhbition. There’ll be a launch, with drinks and readings, at 7pm on World Poetry Day, Friday 21 March 2014.

Trevor Tomkins, by Alban Low

Jawspring is organised by Alban Low, who has a line in producing some lively jazz sketches and album art. Check them out on his blog: artofjazz.blogspot.co.uk. We’re talking a about some live poetry-jazz sketching, and producing a film-poem, and I’m sure something is going to come of this. Here’s a short film he produced a couple of years ago, a walk through London streets…and here’s one of my favourite film-poems, ‘Door’ by Lawrence Bailey, based on a poem by Merton Poets’ own Patrick McManus.

On Friday 28 February I’ll be running a group poetry improvisation workshop as part of the Apples & Snakes Powerplant series. It’s FREE and runs from 10am till 3pm (with a break for lunch) at the Free Word Centre on Farringdon Road, London. Full details here. If you’d like to book a place, get in touch with Apples & Snakes on 020 8465 6154. We’ll be using a mixture of structured and freeform approaches to explore how poets can create spontaneously and collaboratively. If you’d like to hear an example of improvised work, check out this piece I produced for my radio show back in 2008, with Sarah Thomasin and Adele Geraghty. It’s called ‘Are You My Friend?’.

This can be a great way to shake out some fresh ideas, create work for recording and performance, and get some writing done that doesn’t involve sitting on your own staring at a screen for several hours. You should try it!